Jules Verne, Jules Verne Books

JULES VERNE, the "father of science fiction," was born in Nantes, France, in 1828 and died in 1905. He began writing while studying to be a lawyer; when his father discovered this, he cut him off and Verne was forced to support himself as a stockbroker. Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas offered the young Verne writing advice, and eventually he found a publisher who brought out his first adventure novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, in 1863. Set in Africa, it was an instant hit and made Verne financially independent; he went on to write one to two books a year for the rest of his life.

TIM FARRANT is a Lecturer in French at Oxford University and a Fellow of Pembroke College. He is the author of An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Balzac's Shorter Fictions.